* American apartment complexes are typically ugly as hell. They're little building islands in a sea of asphalt, disconnected from the wider street grid too. They'd be more attractive if they were more like the complexes I saw while living in Munich: more green up front, car parking basically all underground.

* Require substantial backyards/courtyards for said complexes.

* More tenant protections that prevent landlords from arbitrarily non-renewing a lease, so that people in apartments can have long-term stability. If you break the rules repeatedly or severely, then sure, landlords should be able to remove you, but otherwise you should be left alone to live your life.

While in Munich, we lived in the Solln neighborhood. It's mostly apartments of some kind (we lived in an apartment, and then a backyard duplex), but they just look a lot less ugly than they typically do in the US. Example area: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Munich,+Germany/@48.081098...

Yup. I'm a weirdo who owns his home but wants a shit-ton more housing built in his city, even if it means my home value goes down. I do know some like-minded folks here, but I would be very surprised if we weren't in the minority.

And it makes sense. We're taught (in the US) to treat our primary residence as an investment, and for most US homeowners it's the most expensive asset they'll ever own, and will be their main vehicle for maintaining their wealth through their later years, and for transferring the remainder of that wealth to their children.

Given that, you'd either have to be self-sabotaging-ly altruistic, or otherwise wealthy enough (outside of your home) that a significant dip in your property's value doesn't tank your finances. I expect that describes a small number of people.

Existing property owners can only afford to hold this opinion because land rents are insufficiently taxed. Through some sort of monumental stupidity we decided to tax labor instead of land. In this sense the SFH, “Americans like suburbia” problem is just a function of poor tax strategy. If homeowners were faced with the economic reality of their choices then markets would fix land use by themselves.

That's incredibly untrue. There are numerous cities, even in CA and NY, that have plenty of room for new single family homes.

The response to that is usually some variant of "eww, gross".